Open source hardware can protect against NSA spying

Eli Dourado from George Mason University suggested to use an open source hardware in order to protect the companies against NSA spying. It will more effectively detect backdoors and vulnerabilities that are built by NSA or other government agencies in the companies' system.

"To make the Internet less susceptible to mass surveillance, we need to recreate the physical layer of its infrastructure on the basis of open-source principles," stated Dourado.

According to the researcher, the use of hardware with open source will succeed, since everyone will be able to modify it, and then provide a modified version to the others. This policy had positive results with the open source software, including Linux and Apache web-servers.

The information about the NSA and U.S. intelligence agencies surveillance became available thanks to the former NSA employee Edward Snowden. At the moment we know that the NSA was gaining access to confidential data on users of services and products provided by Microsoft, Apple and Google.

The documents revealed by Snowden also stated that NSA could intercept Internet traffic through routers and switches. The open source hardware will be really difficult to tap.

Opponents of Dourado’s policies say that, in practice, it will be very difficult for companies to keep track of all hardware upgrades , especially to continuously examine updates of low-level code in hardware.